A place to share my love of baking and feeding people -- family, friends and strangers. These are culinary adventures from my Northeast Portland kitchen and Trinity Episcopal Cathedral's Wednesday Community Meal.

Friday, April 3, 2015

Mossy Bunny Easter Cookies

My friend Cindy invited me over to decorate Easter cookies. She had baked a double batch of egg-shaped cookies and so when I got to her house we just needed to come up with a design.

At first we thought we would decorate the eggs to look like "chicks" but decided that's been done and we wanted to come up with something different.

I mentioned to Cindy that I had seen a cool moss technique from one of my favorite decorators, "Semi Sweet Mike." She was immediately intrigued so I showed her the tutorial on his blog.

"Let's do it," she said. I love working with Cindy so much because she is enthusiastic and gets excited about cookie stuff just like me. So we decided to make a bunny cookie with a mossy background and got to work.

We drew a design, made our moss sprinkles, whipped up a batch of icing and spent the day visiting, decorating and learning. These cookies came out so cute and are perfect for your Easter celebrations.

One important note is that these cookies don't package well because bits of the moss will inevitable off inside the package. These are best served on a platter.

Here's how we made them:

To make the moss, first make graham cracker crumbs using a food processor. Put the crumbs in a ziplock plastic bag.

Tint 1/4 cup vodka with gel coloring. We used a combination of leaf green and electric yellow.

Add the coloring to the crumbs and mix it in by squeezing and smooshing the outside of the bag. This takes a while but it'll happen.

Put the green crumbs on a sheet pan and spread them out and break them up as much as possible. Place them in a 200 degree oven to dry out. Check on them every 5 to 10 minutes and give them a stir to help break the crumbs apart. It took about 30 minutes for them to dry out.

Moss sprinkles!

We sketched a design.

We cut out the bunny face and used an edible ink marker to transfer it to the cookies. We alternated the placement of the bunny face among the cookies.

Then using flood consistency green icing and a #2 tip, outline the bunny and then the cookie.

Fill in the outline and use a skewer to help distribute the icing.

Place the cookie on a piece of parchment paper and sprinkle on some moss. The parchment is important because it catches stray moss that can be reused.

Shake off the excess and set your cookies aside to dry.

After the cookies have dried you can use a soft brush to clean off even more excess moss.

Fill in the bunny with white flood consistency icing. This was a little tricky because if the tip touched the moss, the green got into the icing. It took us a while to get the hang of filling them in.

Let the cookies dry overnight.

The next day use black and pink edible markers to add the facial details.